C’s need real victories, not ‘moral’ ones

Credit: Courtesy

Boston Celtics guard Jaylen Brown shoots a 3-pointer during a team workout at Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio prior to Game 4 of the NBA's Eastern Conference Finals on Sunday, May 20, 2018. Staff photo by Christopher Evans

Credit: Christopher Evans

Boston Celtics teammates Terry Rozier, left, and Jaylen Brown take shots during a team workout at Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio prior to Game 4 of the NBA's Eastern Conference Finals on Sunday, May 20, 2018. Staff photo by Christopher Evans

CLEVELAND — The Celtics have been called all kinds of things this season.

The young, inexperienced Celtics.

The coming-from-behind Celtics.

And … wait for it, wait for it … the playing-with-house-money Celtics, the idea being that without Gordon Hayward and Kyrie Irving anything they accomplished in this postseason was going to be more than anybody could have hoped.

Now we have a new entry: The angry Celtics. To be more precise, they are the angry-at-themselves Celtics. To be even more precise, they are the angry-at-themselves, not-going-to-take-it-anymore Celtics.

That the Celtics are in this salty, self-flagellating mood was made clear yesterday afternoon at Quicken Loans Arena, where the team went through a glorified “practice” session but, as Brad Stevens pointed out, was nothing more than “… fulfilling our media obligations. That’s pretty much why we’re here.”

The real work had been done earlier in the day, as the Celtics sat down and watched the new hot new horror flick, “Cavaliers 116, Celtics 86 in Game 3 of the Eastern Conference finals.”

Stevens was asked, bluntly, if he felt the need to show his players every single mistake on film, and if he held said players accountable.

“I think as coaches you probably watch it over and over and over and over, and then you try to just trim it to what’s necessary,” he said.

What was not said was whether there was screaming, chairs thrown, punishment laps around the arena, and other oldtimey stuff. Well, of course there was none of that. But either Stevens made quite an impression during the Sunday morning meeting, or these guys self-identified themselves as Game 3 slackers. Hence, the anger.

Here’s wise-beyond-his-21-years Jaylen Brown talking about the lessons of Game 3:

“Yeah, I mean, you can use it as fuel,” he said. “I use it as fuel because I thought it was embarrassing. I thought we came out, the way I played, the way I performed, how not aggressive I was in the first half, I look at that as fuel to come out in Game 3 and be excited about it and be ready to play and ready to fight.”

Here’s Marcus Morris: “Personally, I think I did a (expletive) job defensively with LeBron (James). He was too comfortable when I was guarding him. I made myself very vulnerable on screens and wasn’t disciplined. We can’t have that in a game of this magnitude, and it showed. They did a great job of exposing that. Personally, I think I have to do better.”

Here’s Marcus Smart: “We’ve got to stay consistent with our coverages and our game plan. You know, we had a game plan, we didn’t execute it, and they did a good job exploiting us on that end.”

And on it went like that. Give credit to the Celtics, especially such a young player as Brown, for basically saying what was being said about them back in Boston. Not to keep beating up last year’s Red Sox, but that team was all but blueprinted to have an excuse for everything, and the customers grew tired of the act. The Celtics are accepting responsibility, and that’s not a bad thing.

But yesterday’s mea culpas will ring empty and hollow if the Celtics come out tonight in Game 4 and continue to shoot poorly, allow uncontested layups and stand idly by as Kevin Love and James turn the evening into Cirque du Soleil. (Would love to have been a fly on the wall yesterday as the Celtics watched Love make that long bounce pass through traffic to LeBron, who completed a two-handed reverse dunk.)

Besides, not everything Brown said yesterday had the ring of we-accept-responsibility to it. For he also noted that the Celtics “… can’t look at (Game 3) and get down on ourselves or think we’re out of the series because we lost one game. That’s what the world thinks, that’s what the world wants us to think, so we’re going to come out and play some basketball (tonight), regardless of what anybody says.”

Well … no. What a lot of the world was saying, after the first two games of the series, was that the Celtics had a very good chance of advancing to the NBA Finals. Even taking into consideration the whole nothing-is-determined-until-the-home-team-loses-a-game thing, the Celtics were getting a lot of sunshine, and not just in Boston.

Which brings us back to the notion that the Celtics have been playing with “house money” in this postseason. That may have been the case three weeks ago, but for all practical purposes it’s as though the Celtics put all their house money on Bravazo to win the Preakness.

If the C’s let this winnable series slip away, it’s going to sound awfully tinny to say they defied expectations. The house money is gone.